What Am I Doing Here

(Hardback, Main)

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Description

What Am I Doing Here is a startling masterwork by one of the forgotten innovators of American comics. In 1945, after over a decade as a commercial illustrator - drawing advertisements and cartoons for Life, Time, Esquire, Newsweek, and many others - Abner Dean invented a genre all his own: one might call it the Existential Gag Cartoon. It uses the elegant draftsmanship and single panel format of the standard cartoons of the day, but turns them to a deeper, stranger purpose. They are funny, but they are far more than just jokes. With an inimitable mixture of wit, earnestness, and enigmatic surrealism, Dean uses this most ephemeral of forms to explore the deepest mysteries of human existence. What is the point of the world How do I find what I'm looking for What makes me, me And how could this book ever be forgotten What Am I Doing Here is his second book, and may be his best. It depicts a world at once alien and familiar, in which everyone is naked, but acts like they're clothed - a world of club-wielding commuters and byzantine inventions, secret fears and perverse satisfactions. Through it all strolls (or crawls, or floats, or stumbles) Dean's unclad Everyman, searching for love, happiness, and the answers to life's biggest questions.

Reviews

A real mind-bender. Scott McCloud

"Mr. Dean is a great man. He has adapted a modern pictorial form to satire which has the flavor of Hogarth and Rabelais, the implications of Tibetan mysticism, and the hilarity of James Thurber." Saturday Review

Beautifully drawn, thought provoking works of art...For Dean, the combination of image and text could stimulate a wide range of intellectual and emotional responses: delight, frustration, provocation, bewilderment, sadness, or illumination. The Comics Journal

Whether Deans conceptions are readily seized is a question for the individual, who should have a good time finding out. The New York Times

[Deans] best have a disturbingly haunting quality that one rarely finds in the more realistic captioned cartoons of the New Yorker school, and in fact are funny only to the extent of making one giggle hysterically. Northrop Frye

Author Bio

Abner Dean was born in New York City in 1910. Dean attended Dartmouth College and graduated in 1931, returning to New York to study at the National Academy of Art and Design. He began a career as a commercial illustrator, drawing for magazines such as Esquire, the New Yorker, Colliers, Time, and Life. Beginning with It's A Long Way To Heaven in 1945, Dean published seven collections of cartooning work, including What Am I Doing Here, Come as You Are, and Cave Drawings of the Future. Dean's attempt to have his work taken is noted in Clifton Fadiman's preface to What Am I Doing Here, who argues "This book is a real book, and not a collection of cartoons." In later years, Dean appeared as a panelist on the television show Draw to Win, worked on Broadway shows, and acquired two patents, one for a multilevel folding table. He died in 1982.